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The Tampa paper provides more details about CareSync’s abrupt closure last Thursday:

Founder and CEO Travis Bond had left the company “unexpectedly” several weeks before.

The interim CEO assured employees last Monday that the company was “on incredibly good financial footing” because it was about to be acquired by Bill Smith, the founder of grocery delivery company Shipt.

Smith said at an all-hands employee meeting last Monday (photo above), “My family will own 100 percent of the company going forward. We’re making a very significant financial commitment to the company, and my perspective on this is that we’re going to build this company for the long-term. I didn’t come into this thing to flip this company in a couple years … I don’t want you to have to worry about where your next paycheck is coming from.”

The deal fell through Thursday as the company “ran out of time,” after which employees were told to vacate its two Florida locations immediately as the company would be shutting down at midnight.

292 employees lost their jobs. They will not receive severance payments and their health insurance was immediately terminated.

CareSync announced its closure on its website, but says its servers will remain operational so that customers can continue to access their medical information.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

A slight “most” of poll respondents say their employer hasn’t laid people off in 2018. Layoffs are business as usual for many companies, it seems. Maybe that’s a more face-saving option for employees who would otherwise be fired – the health system layoffs I’ve had a hand in orchestrating were all designed to part ways with subpar performers without having to go through the internal and legal challenges of firing them.

New poll to your right or here: do you admire and respect the highest-ranking executive of your employer?

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Decisions

Cozad Community Hospital (NE) went live with Evident supply chain management in May 2018.

Arkansas Children’s Hospital System (AR) will go live with Workday supply chain management software on July 1, 2018.

Holton Community Hospital (KS) switched from Medhost to Athenahealth on June 19, 2018.

These provider-reported updates are supplied by Definitive Healthcare, which offers a free trial of its powerful intelligence on hospitals, physicians, and healthcare providers.

Announcements and Implementations

A Reaction Data report finds that negative opinion about payers acquiring vendors has increased, as has hesitation about sharing information with those companies.

Privacy and Security

A JAMA Network op-ed piece co-authored by former CMS administrator and IHI President Emeritus Don Berwick, MD, MPP says HIPAA causes “serious obstacles to patient care” as misinformed providers refuse to share information with each other and to provide information to family members. The authors note that any time a clinician or clerk says, “I wish I could tell you but HIPAA won’t let me,” they are likely untrained or working under misguided organizational policies. They recommend:

HHS should undertake a study of how often the HIPAA privacy rule is misinterpreted and the impact that has on patients

HHS OCR should publish model policies and procedures

HHS should create and enforce penalties for failing to release patient information to treating clinicians and create a ‘’wall of shame” to call out repeat offenders

Professional societies and patient advocacy groups should mount campaigns to clinicians and patients that call out common misinterpretations of HIPAA

Other

The Madison newspaper describes the VA’s early success in rolling out Epic’s scheduling system. Lead contractor Leidos says it can implement the entire VA system on the system in two years for $350 million versus its contract that calls for a five-year implementation at a cost of $624 million, although the VA hasn’t committed yet or announced its plans following its selection of Cerner.

Former doctor Elisabeth Rosenthal’s New York Times opinion piece says that the White House’s detail-light hopes that encouraging free-market principles to bring drug prices down hasn’t worked historically, as drug companies keep raising prices as a group even as competing products are introduced. It notes that lifesaving leukemia drug Gleevec – invented by a researcher who didn’t seek a patent for it and never made a penny from it – cost $26,000 when it was first marketed in 2001 and has spawned several competing products since, but all of them now cost $150,000 per year.

I received several emails that provided details about the reorganization of Ascension Information Services in which somewhere between 200 to 1,000 employees were rumored to have been let go:

AIS was ordered by Ascension to reduce its FY2019 budget by $155 million

It will retire some legacy systems and reduce the use of contractors such as Cerner and Kaufman Hall

Some employees expressed anger that they weren’t told about the layoffs in advance, that management won’t confirm how many people were let go, and AIS’s lack of transparency about any changes that would affect its Cerner, Epic, and Meditech teams.

Employees were escorted out of the building and weren’t allowed to retrieve their personal items, which were boxed up and delivered to them

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Currently there are "3 comments" on this Article:

The JAMA article which suggests that “HHS should consider creating and enforcing penalties for failure to release all relevant clinical information to treating clinicians in a timely fashion” is a terrible idea. While I agree that HIPAA both by design and by misinterpretation can cause harm I don’t think more legislation is going to fix anything.

HHS has implemented a set of often vaguely written regulations for which they fine organizations heavily if they fail to implement properly. Thus, they have created the “better safe than sorry” mentality that seems to be standard operating procedure at many covered entities these days.

Creating the type of penalties described would likely be a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario.

Even though companies come and go, when something like this happens you can’t help but feel for the employees. That is always a tough pill to swallow. They will all do fine elsewhere, but I’m sure it stings.

As an executive, you are always balancing trying to be transparent with employees, while also not “oversharing” and getting people unnecessarily alarmed. You try your best to maintain some level of stability even though your daily life might have huge ups and downs. In this case, it sounds like management should have been a bit more transparent — if it is true they communicated just a few days earlier that they were on excellent financial footing.

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